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SUMMARY:What is meaning? - Formalising the Distributional Hypothesis - Dao
 ud Clarke\, University of Hertfordshire
DTSTART:20111125T120000Z
DTEND:20111125T130000Z
UID:TALK34551@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ekaterina Kochmar
DESCRIPTION:The distributional hypothesis of Harris states that words have
  similar meanings if and only if they occur in similar contexts. This idea
  has been successfully used to build models of lexical semantics\, in whic
 h the meaning of a word is typically given by a vector describing its occu
 rrence in different contexts. However there is currently no semantic forma
 lism that describes how vector based representations for meaning should be
  composed\, allowing reasoning about the meaning of phrases and sentences.
  In this talk I will introduce Context-theoretic Semantics\, which I devel
 oped as part of my DPhil at the University of Sussex with David Weir. We p
 roposed a framework which uses algebras over the real\nnumbers as vector-b
 ased representations of natural language meaning. This provides a set of p
 roperties which we would expect a method of composing meaning to have\, if
  it holds true to the notion of meaning as\ncontext. We also show that the
 se properties are satisfied by many methods of composition that have been 
 proposed in the literature.\n
LOCATION:FW26\, Computer Laboratory
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